title: Evaluation of somatosensory cortical differences between flutter and vibration tactile stimuli.
abstract: In parallel with advances in haptic-based mobile computing systems, understanding of the neural processing of vibrotactile information becomes of great importance. In the human nervous system, two types of vibrotactile information, flutter and vibration, are delivered from mechanoreceptors to the somatosensory cortex through segregated neural afferents. To investigate how the somatosensory cortex differentiates flutter and vibration, we analyzed the cortical responses to vibrotactile stimuli with a wide range of frequencies. Specifically, we examined whether cortical activity changed most around 50 Hz, which is known as a boundary between flutter and vibration. We explored various measures to evaluate separability of cortical activity across frequency and found that the hypothesis margin method resulted in the greatest separability between flutter and vibration. This result suggests that flutter and vibration information may be processed by different neural processes in the somatosensory cortex.
authors.forename: Sang Woo
authors.initials: SW
authors.lastname: Han
authors.forename: Yoon Gi
authors.initials: YG
authors.lastname: Chung
authors.forename: Hyung-Sik
authors.initials: HS
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Soon-Cheol
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Chung
authors.forename: Jang-Yeon
authors.initials: JY
authors.lastname: Park
authors.forename: Sung-Phil
authors.initials: SP
authors.lastname: Kim
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008465:Mechanoreceptors / Q000502:physiology*; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology; D013003:Somatosensory Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D014110:Touch / Q000502:physiology*; D014732:Vibration; D055815:Young Adult